Wolf + Lamb - Love Someone

Wolf + Lamb - Love Someone
One should approach albums with the word "love" in the title with more than a little caution. They have a habit of being schmaltzy odes to lovers lost or unnecessarily sentimental nonsense about unrequited emotion. Wolf + Lamb's Love Someone doesn't share any characteristics with the aforementioned offenders. But that doesn't mean it's not a record about love. Indeed, it's a remarkably evocative story told though the medium of beats, clicks and snares.

At just seven tracks (plus one remix courtesy of the superb Dyed Soundorom) Love Someone is (quite literally) a brief affair, but one that somehow contains suspense, intrigue, lust and passion before descending into betrayal, anguish, hatred and despair. It's a product of Zev Eisenberg and Gadi Mizrahi (the titular wolf and lamb) and their travels over the past year on the back of the success of their label.

Opener "Just for Now" ups the anticipation of what's the follow with an unidentified male vocalist telling us to beware of "the devil on your shoulder" over a deep, techy groove, stirring the kind of butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling you experience when prepping yourself for a particularly big night out. "Shoeshine Boogie" (a remix of the far poppier Mock & Toof original) moves things on to a significantly more intimate level. Sultry and seductive; this is sex music pure and simple; the wandering bassline as coyly flirtatious as it's possible for a waveform to be.

"Love Someone" is the most upbeat and overtly joyous track on the album, and could soundtrack a montage of a new couple gaily going about their lives with that sundrenched feeling that only getting laid can give you. It's followed by a shift to a darker place. Both the original and Dyed Soundorom mixes of "Want Your Money" are dance floor-friendly, but full of menace as well. "I Know You're Leaving," meanwhile, is a tense, slightly awkward and stunningly realised comment on the business end of breaking up with someone. The chugging beats and anything-but-harmonious background clatter underlay a heartbreakingly mournful vocal. The sudden break into a gospel choir (a momentary glimmer of hope?) before the beats slam back in positively revelatory.

The aptly named "Monster Love" injects a touch of jazz with some warped sentimentality overlaid with stuttering, incomplete utterances to produce a suitably messy finale that leaves you wondering whether or not what you've just gone through was worth it. Finally "I'm" is a purposeful slice of deep, melodic, tech-housiness, rounding of the album with a melancholy sense of optimism, baboon-like yelps and a solitary male vocal. Whether or not Zev and Gadi planned Love to somehow echo the stages of a love affair is anyone's guess. It could just as easily be a load of tracks that the duo had completed and wanted to put out as soon as possible. But even as "just a bunch of songs," Love Someone is a beautifully crafted piece of work.

More on Wolf + Lamb

Some wild extremes make up the whole that is Wolf + Lamb. Extrovert and introvert, vegan and carnivore, cancer survivor and social saboteur – you’d expect no partnership like this could last for long. But for over a decade, these differences have only sparked the seismic energies that Zev and Gadi bring to dance music. They’ve never cared much for current convention – for being “fast enough”, “hard enough”, or “cool enough” to win favor with the party culture hype machine. They play passionate music that moves hearts, and not just feet.
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